Multilingual Mac

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

I've searched through all the comments and info I could find in various forums regarding new language features in High Sierra (in public and developer beta, to be released this fall), but so far have found very little:

+Possibly one new system localization (Hindi)

+No evidence of new keyboards or spellcheckers or reference dictionaries

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Apple's new APFS file system (replacing HFS+) has been implemented in iOS 10.3 and will also become standard in MacOS 10.13 when it is released this fall. It changes the way Unicode Normalization is handled for file names, which could have implications for various languages where the same filename can have different forms depending on the normalization applied.

Whether that will matter in practice I don't know, but readers interested in this complex topic may want to have a look at these two articles and their comments:

I was intrigued by Apple's announcement last week of its new Core ML system for incorporating trained machine learning models into apps for iOS and MacOS. Anyone interested in how such models for neural network language translation can be produced may want to check out this Google tutorial.

Monday, February 27, 2017

Users trying to customize the Character Picker/Accent Menu via the methods that have worked since OS X 10.7 (reported here) will find things have changed in Sierra. For updated instructions see this page.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Word Mac 2011 had essentially no support for Indic scripts, and we always recommended people use a different app for working in them. But the 2016 version (at least the latest update 15.30) seems much improved:

I don't know whether input and display of all these scripts, which often require reordering and complex ligatures, works correctly -- that will need a lot of testing.

Here is a Test Page with a PDF version of a .docx file containing a paragraph in each of the Indic scripts. I do not know them well enough to tell if there are position, ligature, or other errors. Readers who do know them are invited to comment on whether Word is displaying them correctly.

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Emoji symbols were first added to Unicode in its version 6.0 of October 2010, and Apple incorporated font support in iOS and OS X 10.7 shortly thereafter. Since then the number of emojis approved by Unicode has grown regularly: In versión 9.0 there are well over 1000. To ask for a new emoji to be encoded, the place to go is here.

A) Apple's Color Emoji Font embodies special technology and may not work in all apps. Alternative black/white fonts which should work everywhere include Symbola.

B) The details of how emoji's look depend on the special fonts used to display them on each device. So Windows, Android, and Linux users may not see exactly the same picture that you do when you put them in your emails, messages, or web pages.

C) Unicode has devised some fairly complex coding mechanisms to implement emojis for flags, skin tones, and other variables. For further info about these see Unicode TR #51. A Unicode test page for some of these mechanisms is here.

D) Instructions for Emoji input in MacOS are here. For iOS they are here. For a way to input emoji directly via the Unicode Hex keyboard, see this page.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

MacOS 10.12 Sierra deletes the System Preferences > Language & Region > Advanced > General > Format Language selection previously available. Many users found this useful. For a workaround to get the capability back via a terminal command, see the first item in this article.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

For some time Word Mac 2016 has only been able to do Japanese phonetic guides (furigana) automatically. Chinese phonetic guides did not work, you had to enter them manually. But testing this on my most recent version, 15.30, I find that Chinese does work now. When exactly MS fixed this problem I don't know.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

A poster in the Apple Support Communities (ASC) has pointed out that the Sinhala QWERTY input source is missing the character ඳ (U+0DB3). This should be on option-D, but instead that produces ඦ which is already on option-J. A revised .keylayout file with the right character at option-D is available here.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

After a long hiatus for redesign, the excellent Typophile site is back online, including all its earlier discussion posts. It's a first class resource for info and discussions about fonts of all sorts and font creation apps. The new format includes special "communities" for Arabic typography, blackletter, color fonts, Hebrew typography, and variation fonts.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Traditionally full support for "complex scripts" like Devanagari in MacOS and iOS has required the use of special AAT fonts supplied by Apple. The much more common OpenType fonts for such languages used by other platforms would not work right.

While I have not seen anything directly from Apple, typography experts tell me that the Core Text API of Sierra and iOS 10 now supports the specs of the Universal Shaping Engine (USE). The result should be that Apple devices can use a much wider variety of OpenType fonts for the large number of languages which use these scripts. For more info on the USE, see

Saturday, October 29, 2016

I have not seen any comments from Apple about it, but the China Apple Store is showing a keyboard for the new Macbook Pro which has a number of different markings than the normal US keyboard. Also the Hong Kong store lists a new keyboard -- "Chinese - Pinyin" -- in addition to the usual English International when you configure a new Macbook Pro.

Update Jan 12, 2017: This keyboard is now offered with the MacBook Pro in the online US Apple store.

My tests indicate this new keyboard reflects the way the Sierra Pinyin - Simplified Input Source works when the option to switch back to US via Caps Lock has been activated.

Friday, September 23, 2016

During a quick review of MacOS Sierra, I’ve found only few new language features:

+No new user interface localizations

+No new language keyboards

+1 new spellcheck setting — Japanese English

+2 new reference dictionaries — Traditional Chinese and Danish

+2 new English translation dictionaries — Dutch and Italian.

+An option to use Caps Lock to switch quickly to/from Latin and non-Latin input sources (strangely this does not work with Cyrillic, Greek, or Armenian).

Presumably it also has the new Siri support and Chinese/Japanese fonts mentioned in this page.

One useful feature -- the ability to easily set the Format Language to something other than the System Language -- has been removed in Sierra. A workaround for this using the Command Line can be found here.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Apple’s ABC Extended keyboard layout ((formerly called "US Extended") lets you type a vast number of accented and other special latin characters. The standard reference for its codes is here. Unfortunately this reference is missing the following deadkey shortcuts which have been added at some point in recent years.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

While playing with the latest update for Word for Mac 2016, 15.19.1, I thought the level of support for Arabic/Hebrew seemed considerably better. Not only are Arabic characters connected, but the cursor starts at the right and moves properly along with the text, changing fonts doesn't seem to cause problems, punctuation goes in the right place, vowels work, text is inserted where the author expects, etc.

So far there is still no direction control button or menu, and copy/paste from other sources may result in incorrect word order. Also changing the color of the text can mess up chracter order.

I've seen rumors that the next update, 15.20 is supposed to have additional improvements and fixes.

As my knowledge of Arabic/Hebrew is extremely limited, I'd be grateful for comments from readers with better capabilities regarding the usability of this app for such scripts.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Keyman, which has long helped Windows users add special keyboards to their machines, is now available in a beta version for Mac. The app required for users to make custom keyboards themselves is still only for Windows, but the OS X version of Keyman Desktop lets you download a large number of keyboards from the existing Keyman and SIL libraries.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

When using a hardware keyboard with the iOS 9 device, you need to go into Settings > General > Keyboard > Hardware Keyboards and match the layout with whatever your keyboard's key printing is. Unfortunately Apple supplies only a limited selection of such layouts, so it's possible an exact match may not be possible. For example, if your keyboard requires the British PC layout, you are out of luck. I think only one normal iOS keyboard has no hardware layout at all: Tamil.

The 9.2 update to iOS released December 8 includes the following language fixes and added features:

- Improved punctuation input on the 10-key Chinese (Pinyin & Stroke) keyboards with new expanded view of punctuation symbols and better predictions - Fixing an issue on Cyrillic keyboards where caps lock would be enabled when typing in URL or email fields - Siri support for Arabic (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates)